I’m happy to announce in an official way my upcoming album, “Horns of Hope” set to be released on April 5, 2024. Like much of the music has been released in the last 24 months, it’s a culmination of thoughts, feelings and happenings from the season of the pandemic. The time in our lives when Grief came to our doorsteps, and left us forever imprinted.

Partially funded by a grant that I had received in Fall of 2020 from Calgary Arts Development, I remember getting the news that I was a successful applicant. I could only think of the impossibility of it all. How was I going to do what I set out in my proposal? I wrote the grant application in the early times of lockdown, thinking it might last for 3, maybe 6 months. That project had a huge scope, with three albums of duets. Three albums of intimate, original music. When I received the good news that I was a successful applicant, I was not in the good place I thought I was going to be. I had been working in LTC for 3 months. I was about to get COVID for the first time and be isolated for 3 weeks. I didn’t have the energy to cook food let alone create music. Not an original thought came to me at all. For a long time.

I sat on that grant, and bless Calgary Arts Development, they let me.

The time came when I had to make something happen and unlike the decade it took to create BORJONER, this album came together in a 10 month time period. In between coffees with Carsten and the 8 minute drive to work, we made a plan. How would we tie the songs together? After much contemplation and examining the list of songs we wanted to do, I realized that grief was the thread that was stitching it all together. I wanted to explore the ways in which we had all experienced grief during our time in lockdown. Loss of family, loss of identity, loss of relationships, and on the flip side of this, the ways in which we gathered strength and fortitude, the quiet slowdown that we ALL needed.

The plan was executed in November 2022. I felt so unprepared, so fatigued and afraid to fail, but somehow I trusted in my collaborators and the creative process. I got in the car, and sang my heart out to some trusty emotives on the drive to OCL. By the second take of the first track, the flood gates were being released and there was a sense of purpose, that we were doing something special and that it was something none of us would forget in a long time. It is this coming together is my favourite part of being a musician. Not the performance, not the likes on social media, but the feeling of connectedness that we experience when we play music in a room together. Capturing this moment on tape is the four leaf clover that I was looking for, the reward for all the sacrifices we made during lockdown. Little did I know that the recording would be the easy part.

Preparing to release this album has been an unimaginable beast. I can’t explain the sort of doubt and fear that has surfaced, when I couldn’t secure grant funding, when my partner was working 16-18 hour days, when I was working full time, not working at all, getting enough sleep and on and on. As Rick Rubin describes in his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being,

If a creator is so afraid of judgement that they’re unable to move forward, it might be that the desire to share the work isn’t as strong as the desire to protect themselves. Perhaps art isn’t their role. Their temperament might serve a different pursuit. This path is not for everyone. Adversity is part of the process

That was a difficult passage for me to take in this morning, as it laid heavy on my heart while also acting as a call to arms-THIS MUST BE MY PATH-for I am constantly called to be on it by something Other than.

This whole process has been a leap of faith, a move towards trusting the reason I create in the first place. I hope that in my sharing of this process, it will give all of you the push you need to, in the very wise words of my beloved mentor Debra Jensen, “ BREAKTHROUGH and not BREAKDOWN. “

—

AJ